“The End of History”: The Apologetics of Pessimism

In the last century, Western and Russian citizens read Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?”. The resolute intelligentsia attacked the author with criticism: anything could end, but not history! Meanwhile, not all the defenders of history seem to have paid attention to what the American futurist understands under the story.

It’s time to quote the tragic end of the article:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.

For F. Fukuyama, history is not museumification, not placing an artifact on the shelf and not blowing dust off the table. There is no history without struggle, without faith in idols and without their fall, without dramas and tragedies, the antagonism of classes and the clash of ideas. E. Toffler said that the speed of change is growing rapidly. And we sigh, agree with him. But the swift run of time is probably not the source of the life of history, but the cause of her death. The event does not have time to crystallize, it does not condense. Once emerging, it immediately gives way to another. This is not a conveyor – the conveyor allows you to speed up the production of things and ideas. The conveyor belt has logic – from design to result. In the rapid change of “liquid” events there is no logic. To understand this, we must look closely at our own lives: is it not filled with dead embryos of events? Perhaps, having looked, we will not feel any anxiety. In this case, all right!